


Then, drowning.

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: Color bleeds, so make it work for you [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Appropriate use of Beholding powers, Autistic Peter Lukas, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Yeeting, Did I mention there’s drowning, Established Relationship, Human Sacrifice, Isolation, M/M, Minor Character Death, Neither of these two will shut up or chill: the ship, Pre-Canon, Religious cosmic horror as foreplay, Slow To Update
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-08-19 20:20:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20215684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: “Come on, voyeur, tell me something I don’t know. I canseeyou want to.”“Yes,” Elias concedes, at long last. “I do.”





	Then, drowning.

**Author's Note:**

> very strongly recommend having the kind of friend whose response to “I’m writing this because of you personally” is “tag it `Canon-Typical Yeeting`”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > _adj. (German)_, lonely, isolated__
> 
> * * *
> 
> _ __ _
> 
> _ _It’s not a second _date_ as such. It is much more than one second, though._ _

The next time, Elias doesn’t make the pretense that they’re having any kind of meeting, which Peter’s more than fine with allowing. (For one thing he’s sure — knows Elias well enough for that already — they’ll end up talking shop at some point if Peter doesn’t gag him. Or, realistically speaking, and not that the idea doesn’t have its own potential charms even so, if he does.) 

And Elias has gotten interestingly flushed already by the time he elbows Peter away for a moment, the serious set of his face betrayed by how much focus it seems to be taking him to work at his shoes. Peter does consider mocking him for it; but he knows, he figures, and Elias knows, so joke’s on Peter if he actually spells it out. 

Obviously Elias is a bit low on human contact in general, the way he seemingly breathes and bleeds work; his god forbidding relationships would be almost superfluous. Lord knows that’s half of Peter’s excuse right there, he gets it. But still Elias seems so startled, each time, and it’s been awfully gratifying thus far.

Peter’s sure Elias knows that, and knows he knows. He’s not going to give him saying it. The words would make it a somewhat insipid lie straight off. 

After giving it a second that could've been thought, Peter opts for distracting him instead. “Do you know how long he’s going to take to die?”

Elias’s eyes slice toward Peter with no sense of lag time there, but he still betrays himself a bit. “Who?”

It occurs to Peter that, for all he knows, Elias probably doesn’t know what Peter gets out of this, not with any certainty. He’s new enough at the whole avatar business that Peter’s not sure, even, if Elias even has a clean model of what _Elias_ gets out of it. Peter can’t imagine that learning curve, not least because he doesn’t feel like trying, but really it’s no wonder Elias is that marvelously reactive. “The lucky soul I left off, obviously,” Peter says brightly.

“Ah,” Elias says. Anything pointed about it is stolen before it actually starts, face becalmed with what looks like the inevitability of memory. “You don’t.”

“Nope!” It’s an unnecessary statement for communicating; much less so for the reaction he gets, the little ripple of apparently instinctive discomfiture at ignorance Peter expected and a long-suffering obviousness he’s duly insulted by but can’t quite trace. “Doesn’t work that way.”

Elias takes an apparent break from taking the bait; deals with taking off that shoe, finally, and pointedly switches which leg’s swung over a knee to address the other. Waiting more _at_ him than _for._

Peter props his chin up on his hand and tilts his head, expectant. Every inch the eager observer, at least if Elias were an idiot. It’s always important to respect one’s hosts. “So he’s not dead yet, then. How is he doing?”

“You want to know?” Elias raises his eyebrows slightly, attention sliding back toward Peter, and: that’s a cheap shot, but fair, all things considered.

“Eh.” Peter has to drop the whole studious affect to shrug enough, so no great loss, really. “I don’t get to. And you do, I’m sure. It’s why we’re friends and all that.”

“Allies,” Elias says, a little tic against inaccuracy. “You know, I can’t imagine how you live like that.”

Peter thinks, abruptly, of the months-ago realization the first time Elias managed to needle him into bed (which really does seem to be the man’s approach here; then again, it’s working). Of how little Peter himself has anything to do with people beyond his own who aren’t victims, anyone outside him who will matter for more than a heartbeat. It leaves him undefended from just a logistical perspective, a lack of experience to orientate himself with— “Simple,” he says, easily. “I don’t care.”

“Of course.” Elias swings his foot back to the floor, like he’d briefly forgotten, for the sake of argumentativeness, that he does have a body. (Which _is_ typical, really, but still Peter intends to get him to stop that, for as long as can be managed. He looks forward to it.) Looking again toward Peter, Elias fixes him with a kind of air of incoherent challenge that’s abstracted far enough away from the standard faculties of the human face that Peter figures Elias is presumably cheating, with regards to power, just to get the impression he wants across. 

“I’m sure you wouldn’t understand,” Peter goes on once he’s still left unprompted, because — well, it’s lazy, but he is too, and impulse control seems like something to be left for other people. Like Elias, for example, who wears his own apparent discipline like he’s annoyed to find that’s his personality but more annoyed it’s not everyone else’s. See: devastatingly easy to provoke, for this value of results. 

Though he doesn’t take _that_ bait, right now, which, all right, really is fair. Peter’s been less unsubtle than this, in his life. No surprise that Elias could hold him accountable to that, if only by way of performing the closest his sort can get to indifference.

And Peter even does kind of like the prospect, actually, knowing it’s an option… “Come on, voyeur, tell me something I don’t know. I can _see_ you want to.”

Elias sighs, and rolls his eyes very briefly; and obviously, obviously does, wholeheartedly and uncompromising. It’s actually a bit startling, not just the shift in focus but the strict evidence of what takes precedence for him, in him, through him, throughout. 

The antagonism’s still there — for one thing, Elias is breathing — but it’s been thrown into sharp relief as always having been irrelevant, when lit up by contrast against the only thing that matters. Certainly Peter’s no mindreader, but he hardly needs to be for this.

Peter knows _wanting_, after all.

“Yes,” Elias concedes. “I do.”

Admittedly, Peter’s also bad at waiting, so he presumes even in the brief pause that follows the effort shows, in some way he wouldn’t have the faintest chance at guessing himself. It does occur to him to wave Elias on condescendingly, but only just, significantly before it would make sense even as an insult. 

“Do you _mind,_” Elias adds — interrupts — after a fraction of a second, with annoyance that would’ve been on topic if he’d already asked once as opposed to assuming an entitlement to Peter knowing what he means. Peter considers actually making Elias articulate the request in fact; but he opts to humor him in the end.

To some extent, anyway. “Do you actually need me to back off?” he asks; knows it came out as mocking a false curiosity as Peter meant it when Elias doesn’t answer. 

Or doesn’t answer but for something briefly strained about the eyes, at least. Peter could still press him for a response, but he’s got the sense that would backfire. Time enough to follow up on this implication of a weakness later, he thinks; itself still an odd thought, the idea of a malleable future worth planning about.

But he reels himself in, a little, without needing to be asked again, and the bare minimum is evidently still enough to make Elias visibly relax.

This is, itself, another novelty. Peter could almost be annoyed; no one told him Beholding types are contagious, but that’s about what it feels like. How he would drop the piano wire of unknowns strung between them at will and trust Elias is the one who’d feel the whiplash from it, but as long as it’s all the same to his own god Peter… doesn’t actually seem to want to. Instead he pulls back in a way he’s not anything like accustomed to, even if he does know he can: frozen halfway between habits he knows better, between leaving Elias alone and taking him. Enough to still be in the same room as where Elias sighs a bit below hearing and lets his eyes tip shut, slowly, in a way that makes Peter think about irony for a second. 

Then it registers he’s being facile, so he stops.

He can’t tell, like this, if what he’s feeling is an undiminished sense of being watched or just the awareness of another person still here. And Elias _is_ still here (Peter watches — which, fair enough — his throat when he swallows, still ostensibly meditative, and notes that the palpable sense of effort here is either another vulnerability to pursue or something he can needle Elias about later, depending), whatever he’s looking at. Peter’s confident of that much; he’s not too proud to admit to himself that he’s managing this much control largely because letting Elias look elsewhere has done nothing to lift his focus from the small and demanding god Peter’s so used to stepping in when people ignore.

Generally Peter doesn’t do things tentatively like this when he can instead own every space he is ever in, and either others exist there for a time or they don’t. (There are people in his family with an interest in exploring this kind of balance for its own sake, and good on them, really, but all they’ll get out of trying to share it with him is ironic drift. Peter wouldn’t be the one remanded to the sea if he’d shown a tendency toward taking things by halves.) But these attempts are enough for him to know it’s possible to let people on a longer leash when they’re in your orbit, and now it needles him a bit, all ribs and sternum and disjointedness about the clavicles, to know Elias has got him trying. That Peter, technically, asked.

So Elias is pulled firmly back into Peter’s own present. But hovering on this knife’s edge of his own power doesn’t make Peter feel haunting or even alone; it makes him feel queasily forgotten, to be taking this stab at letting Elias freely think of anything but him.

Except — something shifts in the air, the air that they are in fact still both breathing, and Elias relaxes into something just as still and intent by self-possessing but easier for Peter to hold in his own awareness, sharp lines snapping into equally still curves — except he’s not, is he? Not just because he’s giving Peter what Peter had flippantly said he’d want, because he said it, or else making a definite effort to. Something else.

Peter’s almost pinned it down by the the time Elias starts to speak (the slightest personal twist at the edge of his mouth remaining to show impatience for that minute-or-two delay). He relaxes toward that cadence, and, appropriate as it is to present company, _keeps_ the company, and Peter watches. He watches Elias hand himself to the little god.

It’s a little dizzying to parse out: Elias himself is not feeling pain, or fear, or loss. He’s feeling something else, Peter thinks, but whatever it is, it doesn’t reach. He centers himself in what really should be Peter’s world and none of the feeling comes from him but it fills the room all the same, misery as pure and right as Peter’s ever seen on a victim in the moment they come to understanding but strung taut throughout as he speaks, sweet and clear in the back of Peter’s own throat. It comes into the air they’re both breathing in advance of its presence in the story, the end a pall hanging over the entirety of it, beats of ignorance and innocence and reprieve turned foreshadowing, every moment pointed toward what’s already been done.

And Peter _doesn’t_ actually know this story, he realizes, not quite amused by it. He knows what it means but it’s not like he goes around asking any random victim why they’re leaching a promise of a hopeless end into their surroundings, handing themselves over to him; why would he? That would imply someone cares. 

Even the people who miss them, after, didn’t _care_. Peter makes sure of that; he is what makes sure of that. The why doesn’t come into it.

Elias cares, though. And isn’t that something else? He’s so focused part of Peter wants to distract him just on principle, take matters into his own hands and ruck Elias back into awareness of his body, bring back up that argument Elias seems to enjoy but never wins. Only he is extremely sure that would backfire on him, were he to reduce them to it now; Peter isn’t going to make Elias _want_ him to leave if he can help it, that’s quite outside the point. 

So he pushes his own tongue against the flats of his teeth, and he doesn’t listen, really, but he looks. Might as well, following in the spirit of foreigners when one’s among them, he thinks and doesn’t smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: _Alone, he remembers that death is in the water, and alone he shies from the railing._


End file.
